1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a management apparatus, a management system, and a management method of an image forming apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
Various inventions have been proposed that predict occurrence of abnormality based on status information of an image forming apparatus and effectively manage service operation of the image forming apparatus.
For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2003-215986 discloses a system that predicts an occurrence of abnormality based on the number of times of abnormal events. Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. H5-164800 discloses a diagnosing method and a diagnosing apparatus that summarize abnormality occurrence information and status information relating to the occurrences of abnormality of copying machines, and find a common cause in particular abnormalities by statistically processing the information. Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2001-175328 discloses a technique by which a copying machine identifies the cause of an occurrence of abnormality by integrating information on sensors, counters, or the like provided to the copying machine.
In the system disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2003-215986, the collected information is limited to the number of occurrence times of abnormal events. As a result, predictable abnormalities are limited to certain types.
In the invention disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. H5-164800, information obtained from the copying machines is transmitted to a server through a network, causing the load imposed on the network to increase. In addition, the server needs to have a high computational power for intensively processing the information from a large number of copying machines in the market, resulting in an increase in system establishment costs.
In the invention disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2001-175328, the load on a management system is small because abnormality occurrence symptom determination is performed inside the copying machine. However, the invention also employs a technique requiring a high computational power, such as a neural network prediction and the Bayesian inference, as another abnormality occurrence symptom determination method. Thus, the load on a processing unit and a storage unit included in the copying machine is increased. As a result, other operations performed by the copying machine, such as image processing and mechanical control, may be adversely affected to cause processing delay and a decrease in processing speed, for example.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2009-037141 discloses a management apparatus developed aiming to solve the above-described problems and enable determination of a symptom that may lead to a likely occurrence of abnormality. The management apparatus receives a plurality of types of status data from an image forming apparatus, stores the data in a database having status data, generates a plurality of types of target data for abnormality occurrence symptom determination based on the plurality of types of status data, determines whether the plurality of types of target data exceed reference values set for each of a corresponding type of status data, and determines whether abnormality occurrence symptom is present or absent for the whole of the plurality of types of status data based on majority decision by weighting a determination result for each type of status data using a weight set for each type of status data.
Various maintenance operations are performed on image forming apparatuses by each of manufacturer thereof so that the apparatuses can be used in good conditions. When receiving a request, from a customer of an image forming apparatus, of maintenance operation related to a failure such as an image defect, a maintenance person estimates the cause of a phenomenon such as the image defect based on the contents of the latest maintenance operations, the types of parts or consumable parts having been replaced recently, and the characteristics of the apparatus, for example.
Then, typically, the maintenance person reproduces the failure and eliminates the failure at the site of the customer who has requested the maintenance operation. In some cases, a test is required to reproduce a condition in which various causes leading to the phenomenon such as the image defect occur, making it difficult to identify the root cause of the failure.
When a remote diagnosing system is connected to the image forming apparatus, history of information relating to an image control voltage for image forming can be checked with a central management apparatus of the remote diagnosing system. The current remote diagnosing system, however, stores therein only notification history of abnormal phenomena, and no information history relating to the image control voltage for image forming performed every day at a scheduled time or after a fixed number of printouts is completed. Therefore, it is difficult to accurately identify the cause of the image defect.
In particular, the image control voltage varies for every printing due to the sensitivity change of a consumable part, and also varies when the consumable part is replaced with a new part, because the new part has different sensitivity from the old part. Therefore, it is difficult to accurately estimate the cause of the failure such as the image defect at the customer site even if past maintenance operation results are known.
For example, even when the reproducibility of a phenomenon of a broken apparatus is confirmed at a customer site, the cause of a defect is identified as a drum failure due to deterioration, for example, and the image defect is eliminated by replacing the deteriorated drum with a new drum, the image defect due to drum deterioration may occur again within several days although the failure is temporarily eliminated by replacement of the drum if the root cause of the defect is early deterioration of the drum due to abnormal output of an electric charger, for example.